In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors that can whisk people far away. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through.

Exit West follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.

“Hamid rewrites the world as a place thoroughly, gorgeously, and permanently overrun by refugees and migrants. . . . But, still, he depicts the world as resolutely beautiful and, at its core, unchanged. The novel feels immediately canonical, so firm and unerring is Hamid’s understanding of our time and its most pressing questions.” —The New Yorker